Burnout record bid

People who love to hate Canberra's annual Summernats car festival will have one more reason to consider leaving town for the 2013 event - organisers are hoping to set a world record for the biggest mass burnout.

Seventy street machines will line up side-by-side on the first Friday in January to simultaneously smoke some rubber. "It's the brainchild of our general manager ... if anyone wants to know who to complain to," event co-owner Andy Lopez told reporters on Tuesday. "It will be unlike anything that has ever been seen or heard before." The only similar existing world record is for mass doughnuts.

The 26th Summernats will run from January 3 to 6 at Canberra's Exhibition Park. Just over 90,000 revheads attended the four-day event in 2012. It was arrest-free, proving organisers had successfully made Summernats more family friendly after bad crowd behaviour in 2008 threatened its viability.

Mr Lopez on Tuesday said the world needed a mass burnout record. "So we are going to deliver," he said when launching the 2013 event with ACT Tourism Minister Andrew Barr. "We went to Guinness and said how about 30 (cars), and they said, 'It's actually meant to be really hard to set a world record. How about 50?'

"And we said okay we'll do 70." To set the burnout record all 70 cars will have to burn rubber for at least 10 seconds simultaneously.